Will Paul Ryan and GOP Budget Negotiators Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?!?

Except this joke isn’t very funny since a lot of bad policy occurs when gullible GOPers get lured into “bipartisan” deals that expand government. Consider, for example, all the tax-hiking budget deals – such as the “read my lips” capitulation of the first President Bush – that enable more spending.

To be fair, sometimes Republicans are placed in a no-win situation. During the “fiscal cliff” discussions last year, Obama held the upper hand since he would get a huge automatic tax hike if nothing happened. So the final agreement, which resulted in a smaller tax increase, was actually better (or, to be more accurate, less worse) than I was expecting.

But in other cases, Republicans should prevail because they have the stronger hand. That’s the situation we’re in today with the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration.

But after years of unconstrained spending by both Bush and Obama, any fiscal restraint is a welcome development. Indeed, the sequester helps to explain why we’ve seen two consecutive years of lower spending in Washington for the first time since the 1950s.

But maybe Obama will have the last laugh because some Republicans are negotiating with Democrats to undo some of the benefits of sequestration. Here are some excerpts from a Politico report.

…an agreement may not be so elusive after all. Hopes are growing that Ryan and Murray could reach a narrow deal to replace a portion of the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, according to lawmakers and senior aides involved in the discussions. …On Tuesday, several key lawmakers and aides said there was about a 50-50 chance, if not better, that a small deal could be reached — a much better prognosis than many had anticipated. Murray said in an interview Tuesday that she’s in “very good conversations” with Ryan. “The goal here is to replace sequestration with responsible spending cuts and revenue,” Murray said.

But we don’t need a vivid imagination to know what she means by “revenue.” The real question is why Republicans would be willing to “feed the beast” with more revenue, particularly when it means eviscerating the genuine spending restraint imposed by sequestration.

House and Senate appropriators are putting major pressure on Murray and Ryan… Revenue raisers being discussed include increased Transportation Security Administration fees… As an extra bargaining chip, Republicans would consider including an extension of extended unemployment benefits, which expire on Dec. 28. …Murray has made clear she won’t agree to any structural changes to Medicare or Social Security, particularly without significant revenue increases.

So let’s summarize this issue.

Current law is the sequester, which is a big victory.

The big spenders understandably want to eliminate or weaken the sequester, and would be especially happy to get more revenue coming to Washington.

Paul Ryan and the other Republican negotiators have the upper hand since the sequester continues if there’s no agreement.

So we have to ask ourselves why GOPers are even bothering to negotiate. There are two possible answers.

1. The “stupid party” joke actually is an accurate assessment of mental ability and Republicans are easy to trick because of their developmental challenges.

2. Republicans pretend to be fiscal conservatives when talking to voters but secretly want to enable more spending by sabotaging the sequester.

I’m actually being a bit unfair. What’s really happening is that there are divisions inside the GOP. A majority of the Republican caucus presumably understands that they hold a winning hand and they’re content to maintain current law and let the sequester continue.

But the Republicans on the Appropriations Committee tend to dislike the sequester since it reduces their ability to spend other people’s money in exchange for political support.

They correctly complain that America’s main fiscal problem is entitlement spending, so you can understand why they’re a bit irked that their programs are being restrained while boondoggles such as Obamacare are putting us deeper in a fiscal hole.

But that’s not an argument to waste money on so-called discretionary programs. Moreover, the appropriators are wildly wrong when they assert that appropriations spending already has been “cut to the bone.”

In an ideal world, policy makers would focus first on desperately needed entitlement reform. And I suspect many members of the Appropriations and Defense Committees would grumble a lot less about restraints on discretionary spending if real structural reforms to so-called mandatory programs were being implemented.

But we don’t live in that world. The sad reality of Washington is that genuine entitlement reform won’t happen with Obama in the White House. But that’s not an argument for surrendering on sequestration and allowing discretionary spending to climb at a faster rate.

Two words always come to mind when I see these folks performing such stupid moves: TERM LIMITS. But, as pointed out in this article- what is the possibility of getting them to enact a law that would limit their political future, and stranglehold on the seats of power?

You are blatantly lying, Mr Mitchell. It isn’t just that you are dead wrong; you are blatantly and shamelessly LYING.

You falsely claim that:

“There are also some hawks who accurately complain that defense spending incurs a disproportionate share of the sequester, but they are wrong when they say this endangers national security. After all, defense spending still grows under sequestration and America will still account for nearly 50 percent of the world’s military spending.”

All of these claims are blatant lies, which means tht the person making them is a liar.

Defense spending is NOT growing under sequestration – it is shrinking, and deeply so. In FY2014, base defense spending will be cut to a mere $475 bn, whereas it was $525 bn just two FYs ago, in FY2012. After that, it will resume very slow, turtle-like growth – but even at the end of the sequestration decade, in FY2022, it will still be below $500 bn, at $493 bn. Concurrently, OCO/GWOT (war) spending has been declining rapidly year after year since FY2012 and will continue to do so with or without the sequester.

And yes, contrary to your pious denials, sequestration DOES endanger national security – and very badly. It is dramatically reducing the funding available for the military’s training, day to day operation and maintenance (incl. spare parts and fuel), research and development, and the acquisition of new equipment (which is badly needed to replace the hopelessly obsolete and ineffective gear the US military is largely using today).

Secretary Hagel has recently admitted that if sequestration persists, he will have to DEEPLY cut the military’s size or its readiness and modernization programs – or both. Several think tanks, including the AEI, the CSIS, the CNAS, and the CSBA, have confirmed this and in their own sequestration exercise have confirmed the DOD would either have to sharply cut the military’s size AND readiness or its modernization programs.

The Joint Chiefs are saying that Sec. Hagel’s assumptions are actually too rosy and that under sequestration, the military will have to deeply cut all three categories, leaving the military too small AND unready for combat AND left with woefully obsolete equipment. The Army will have to be cut to just 380,000 men, the Marines to just 150,000, the Navy to about 230 ships, and the Air Force will have to eliminate entire fleets of aircraft, including all A-10s, B-1s, KC-10s, and maybe even F-15s – and cancel entire programs and missions, for example, combat search and rescue of military personnel in distress. The Army, moreover, will have only 2 fully-combat-ready brigades, plus those stationed in Korea and preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

Already during the previous fiscal year, the first under sequestration, there was ample proof that this idiotic mechanism WILL gut the military. One third of the USAF’s entire combat fleet was grounded for a lack of funding; maintenance for hundreds of military a/c and dozens of ships was delayed or cancelled; training for numerous USMC and US Army brigades was cancelled.

And now, USAF pilots are leaving the service in droves, because again, due to sequestration, many units don’t have the money to fly, and pilots joined the military to fly and fight, not to sit on their asses, so they’re leaving the military and will join civilian airlines.

By the way, if the USAF were an airline, it would be on everyone’s airline blacklist. Its aircraft fleet is already hopelessly obsolete, with average aircrat age at 25 years.

So sequestration, contrary to your blatant lies, Mr Mitchell, is ALREADY threatening national security and gutting the military – and what we’ve seen so far is just the foretaste. As confirmed by EVERY non-leftist think-tank in the US, from the AEI and Heritage to the CSIS, CNAS, CSBA, and the Bipartisan Policy Center, and as confirmed by all of the Joint Chiefs, the SECDEF, his predecessors (Gates and Panetta), all Service Secretaries, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and numerous retired military officers.

Republicans have a tough act to follow, since they inhabit that dissonant political space where their advertised political ideology goes mostly against their personal interests. A politician that supports less politics and less political intervention into the economy is a rare and unnatural politician indeed.

It is thus delusional to expect significant political motivation towards diminishing the importance of politics themselves. It is the people who must guard against further and further drifts way from the peak of the Rahn Curve.

But with a majority of voters essentially wanting bigger government and collective economic dirigisme — in a delusional calculation that the temporary benefits of redistribution will outweigh the government monopoly middleman overhead, resulting flatter effort-reward curves, motivation below the international competitiveness threshold, and a relentless slower growth to decline — there is little hope for politicians to advocate less need for their services. Consequently, there is little hope for the US escaping the natural cycle of decline, whereby prosperity gives people enough comfort and time to turn into hippies.

The countries that a majority of American voters now aspire to emulate, Italy, France, Germany, Scandinavia, are not countries in equilibrium. They are all in decline. Some at a precipitous rate, some at a manageable rate. But all nonetheless on a decline trajectory. Any country that fails to match average worldwide growth levels is in a relentless decline — by elementary arithmetic definition. When your growth trendline is a couple of percentage points below the world average, then decline is only a matter of time.

What has changed is that unlike the past slow moving world where voters could often pass a large portion of their mistakes to distant, yet unborn generations, now, in our new permanently fast world, the very generation that votes delusionaly will also suffer the consequences, together with their immediate descendants, their children.

Delusional leftists think that “as long as my standard of living does not decline, and actually even increases at a modest one to two percent rate, I’m ok, let the rest of the world grow faster”. But what is luxury today will be necessity and a prerequisite for decency tomorrow. If one had followed the same logic a few hundred years ago, we would now still be living in a world with potato blights, without antibiotics, without machines, without surgery etc. conversely, had we had more growth minded people in the past few centuries, we would likely already be living in a post cancer world, decreased or even stalled aging world, to great life expectancies and also be multiple times wealthier to enjoy all our time in this world. In short, the compounding effects of even small changes in growth trendline are almost unimaginable — both in the plus, as well as minus direction.

In a future world where cancer is cured, or even the process of DNA damage that causes aging is arrested, having these seemingly exotic tools at your disposal will not be luxury, but simple life standard decency. If people in other countries live a couple of centuries and your slow growing country is still stuck at a life expectancy below one hundred, then you will be living a wretched life. YOU will now be the Africa and THEY will be the developed world. But every hippie moves this fantastical future life further and further into the future, just like the various incarnations of past hippies in past centuries have us still working in a world with cancer.

In summary, growth is not some abstract artificial construct of capitalism to keep people like Mr. Mitchell busy. It is future prosperity, future fantastic levels of decency, future fantastic lives, billions of them. Of course, if that makes you inherently envious, then being against it makes some pathetic sense.

So, what is the practical advice at the personal level?

Keep mobile and teach your children the same skill.

While the US together with most of the western world enters an ever intensifying loss of top prosperity (ie relative decline), human progress and cultural evolution cannot be stopped. Environments operating closer to the Rahn Curve maximum will emerge, by virtue of the empirical utilitarian selection whereby those who do will prosper and expand. The great issue is trying to discern which (few) ones of the western world democracies will escape the:
“People rule and regulate everything” moribund, high entropy, pitchfork democracy to decline.

So, stay mobile…

Or, you can ignore the issue and go back to your normal life, hoping that one of these days Mr. Mitchell and a few other holdouts of freedom and individualism garner majoritarian support.

the largest security threat America faces is fiscal irresponsibility… it’s time to re-think the role of our military in the world… and stop underwriting the defense of wealthy nations… we have seen the results of unrestrained military adventurism… we have destabilized the Mideast… killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions… all at the expense of the American taxpayer… for what? so Iraq could freely sell it’s oil to china? the world will be dealing with crisis after crisis for generations because of American shortsighted military actions… we have generated untold hatred and contempt within the societies victimized by our misguided use of military force… and yet the militarists whine for more money… more resources… more war… all in the name of national defense… at some level… we are losing our edge… and unless we refocus our energies on being more fiscally responsible… more competitive in the world marketplace we will become increasingly irrelevant… and military force will not save us… it’s time to focus on butter……………………. not guns…